Table of Content  Branch Up  

The Web Site

It's easy to get lost in this web site if you think of it as a web site, because it is designed more like a collection or "books".

When you enter a "book" you see a Table of Content (TOC) which is organized as a tree. When you click a TOC entry, you get to the entire branch (from that point down) presented as a book chapter. So it is opt to you to watch the entire book, part of it or to focus in a single record.

Once in branch view, you can use the TOC link to return to the Table of Content or you can use the Step-Up link to navigate the tree backwards (one step back). You can also click on a title to navigate the tree forward (narrow).

If you plan to print from this site, use the "Print View" link. It will take you to a non-web-looking version of the branch you are visiting. If you happen to be in the TOC, then the whole book will be presented. Actually, this is the only way of watching the entire book at once.

Finally is the "Search Box". The search engine is quite primitive: if finds records containing the keyword you entered as a substring of either its title of its content. For example, if you are looking for "homebrew computer" you can enter "homebr". In the resulting list, books are highlighted in bold. Search is case insensitive.

Binary download is not implemented yet but it will be soon.

This site was written with PHP, based on a generic library I developed some ago, called "Help Books". It relies on a MySQL database which structure is very simple: records are defined to be "nodes" of a unique tree; "Books" are actually nodes which parents happen to be the root of the tree.

Help Books had proven to be a convenient technology since it allows for easy rearrange of the content. In fact, moving entire branches (even across books) is very simple from the code prospective. The hierarchical organization of the content, on the other part, is very natural for technical documentation such as that for this project in particular.

As a consequence of the flexibility provided by Help Books technology, this site is in constant change, not only because new content is added frequently but also because existing content is being rearranged in favor or organization. The site you are visiting right now might be very different from what it was months ago.

Nevertheless what you are visiting now is the most recent and convenient view of a huge amount of content built little by little along months of documentation effort, and is still growing and reshaped conveniently as the project evolves.